Skip to Content
Brainhack
book

Brainhack

by Neil Pavitt
March 2016
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 9m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Brainhack

8 Be More Musical

“I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music . . . I get most joy in life out of music.”

Einstein

If you're a musician, you're in luck. Every time you play, you're giving your brain one of the best workouts it can get. Neuroscientists have shown that musical skill requires a suite of neural processes firing in tandem: perceptual, cognitive, motor, and executive. Making a career as a musician is like being a professional bodybuilder of the mind.

Steven Pinker and others feel that our musical powers – some of them at least – are made possible by using, or recruiting, or co-opting brain systems that have already developed for other purposes. This might go with the fact that there is no single “music centre” in the human brain, but the involvement of a dozen scattered networks.

Playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum – the bridge between the two hemispheres – allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.

So maybe Einstein's love of music was more than just a pleasant distraction from all that hard thinking he did. In actual fact, playing his violin was very much part of his working day. After a few hours thinking, he'd pick up his violin and then the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

mHealth Multidisciplinary Verticals

mHealth Multidisciplinary Verticals

Sasan Adibi
Taking Care of Yourself (HBR Working Parents Series)

Taking Care of Yourself (HBR Working Parents Series)

Harvard Business Review, Daisy Dowling, Stewart D. Friedman, Scott Behson, Heidi Grant
Executive Charisma

Executive Charisma

D. A. Benton

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780857086426Purchase book